Driving innovation in your digital world

Red Hat Forum London is the premier UK open source technology event to showcase the latest and greatest in cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage, and systems management technologies. The event brings together IT decision makers, architects and developers (to name a few) to discuss hybrid cloud, devops, containers and many more topics that are driving innovation.

Join us on October 3 to learn from leading enterprises and partners as they share success stories of their digital journeys.

Keynote Details

09:35 - Keynote

Red Hat Keynote - Your Future IT is Built on What You Do Today

Joe Fitzgerald, VP & GM Management Business Unit

Today’s IT choices aren’t about technology-they’re changing the way business is done. Our customers find ways to adjust their culture, improve processes, and implement open source solutions that meet today’s demands and adapt to what tomorrow could bring. Modern IT requires more: flexible processes, an agile culture, and the backing of a solid ecosystem. You can’t go it alone, but we’re here to help. Our customers evolve their organizations to build better solutions that help them prepare for what’s next.

10:10 - Keynote

Platinum sponsor Keynote: Leading in the NEW towards Digital Transformation

Rotating rapidly to "new" IT is no longer an option— it’s a must. With the unceasing emergence of new technologies, traditional ‘IT’ departments face incredible pressure. Technology is moving rapidly from an enabler of business value to becoming in many ways the source of value, itself.
For more than a decade, Accenture and Red Hat have teamed up to help businesses and governments implement open source solutions for complex enterprise-scale projects. Accenture and Red Hat help organizations develop Open Source solutions to increase enterprise agility, accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and improve quality and security. Accenture will be presenting about leading in the new and digital transformation with RedHat technologies.

11:10 - Customer Keynotes

Efficiency & Effectiveness through DevOps

The British Army's Information Application Services (IAS) Branch delivers software applications, hosting, and web services to families, veterans, and personnel deployed around the world. To overcome issues with unplanned downtime and support, IAS used Red Hat solutions to migrate its private cloud environment and deploy simplified, automated management tools. In this talk, you'll hear about their DevOps & Continuous Integration journey and how it has allowed their smartest people to work on more innovative projects.

Not All Problems are Technical

This session will focus on the vision, benefits and challenges of deploying workload orchestration platforms, such as OpenShift, into a large, regulated enterprise. Discussing issues such as how to scale roll outs and the challenges this brings within the wider organisation. We’ll be exploring topics such as community engagement, image governance and managing the expectations of both the development community and the business objectives.

Application Development Breakout Sessions

13:00

Openshift - the Art of Development

Ian 'Uth' Lawson, Senior Solution Architect, Red Hat

Openshift from a pure and battle-hardened Developer perspective - why it is a complete game-changer, how it makes all the hard bits easy, and why Devs will love it. Covering - the dev aspects of Openshift, Openshift.io, the dev-ops pipeline in totality, lots of quick-fire demos, automation in a sane way, letting Devs dev.

13:45

Partner Presentation - Why Microservices Fail

Steve Ross-Talbot, Chief Technology Officer - Estafet

Whilst Microservices currently dominate conferences and the language of product vendors - often linked to APIs, Continuous Delivery, Containers and PaaS - the deluge of information often confuses rather than clarifies. This has led to sub-optimal microservices architectures and some public failures.
In this talk, we will discuss both data-centric and interaction-centric approaches, looking at what happens when people “code-first-and-ask-questions-later”. How much up-front thinking do you need?, and how can you exert sufficient control over implementations once they are live?
The future may well include policy-driven microservices architecture, but you need to ask some tough questions now if you are going to deliver to the business on a continued and scaled basis.

14:30

Customer Presentation - Monetising Digital Assets with API Management

Oxford University Press has a successful business licensing dictionary content to a multitude of tech partners and last year embarked on an API programme to further their product offering and meet the changing needs of the market. This talk will describe the questions, challenges, and processes OUP encountered along the way, and offers the perspective of one company seeking to monetize their content in a rapidly evolving API economy.

16:25

Partner Presentation - Configuring a Service Mesh for an OpenShift-Kubernetes Cluster

Running a few containers in a dev/test environment with open source tools is very different from running large clusters with thousands of containers supporting production applications. When it is time to deploy these applications in a production environment, whether on-premises or in a public cloud such as AWS or Azure, there are various application services needed and practical considerations to be taken care of, for a successful deployment.
In this session, James & Roberto will discuss the need for an ingress controller and an intra-cluster traffic manager and demonstrate how to: Deploy a service mesh in an OpenShift-Kubernetes cluster; Configure the cluster to collect real-time insights into app traffic; Enforce security via micro-segmentation; Plan for day 2 operations such as availability, upgrades, migrations, etc.; Scale elastically for unplanned app traffic spikes; Ensure application and resource availability; Execute blue-green graceful migrations and upgrades.

OpenShift & Microservices in Action - Financial Services Examples

Accenture will take you on a journey, where you can gain first-hand experiences of and understand how we have successfully implemented Microservices on Openshift for two financial service clients. Hear how the Accenture ADOP solution allowed a rapid implementation of a DevOps approach for one of our financial services customers, leveraging Openshift and a microservices approachHear how an Accenture delivery team engaged in Open Banking and created a Java / Spring-Boot microservices architecture deployed to Openshift.Hear about some of the real life challenges faced and how they were tackledSee a demo of one of our solutions in actionThroughout the session the speakers will share knowledge through real life case studies of implementations at Accenture customers

13:45

You now have 1000’s of containers - what next?

Anthony Kesterton, Senior Solution Architect - Red Hat

The container format has been incredibly successful, allowing people to build and deploy applications faster and more efficiently. The proliferation of containers in turn generates questions around the ongoing monitoring and management of containers, the day-to-day operational matters that are well understood for bare metal and virtual machines. This session provides practical advice around container lifecycles, management and monitoring, using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and Red Hat CloudForms. This is based on experiences working with large financial organisations and other enterprise customers, offering guidance you can take back and apply in your day-to-day activities.

14:30

Justin Davies Open Source Technical Lead - Microsoft

According to IDC, the majority of digital transformation initiatives will be unable to scale due to lack of strategic architecture. With Red Hat solutions on Azure, you can leap forward without boundaries using solutions that get better all the time—and work better together. Hear how to maximize the value to your existing Red Hat investment by transitioning to the cloud, and gain all that Azure has to offer, including the ability to scale quickly and easily, pay only for what you use, and save on compute power. Plus, use the Java, Linux, and other skills that your team already has to speed your digital transformation while the joint Microsoft and Red Hat security response team actively monitors emerging threats, and our joint engineering teams keep making improvements that add more value to your deployments.

15:40

Don’t let your hybrid cloud turn into a monster

Martin Percival, Principal Solutions Architect, Red Hat

The promise of hybrid cloud should bring you all the benefits of data control with all of the power and flexibility of a public cloud solution. So why is it so hard to blend the two models into a working architecture? In this session we will look at the promises and pitfalls, best practices and blind alleys of hybrid cloud and discuss solutions that meet the needs of different use cases.

Open Innovation Lab Experience - Motability Operation's Story

Motability Operations decided to engage in Red Hat Open Innovation Labs immersive residency to get a deeper understanding of OpenShift and learn more about best practices for building Micrsoservices, setting up continuous delivery pipelines and the latest modernizing application development technics. This presentation will cover this journey and their experiences.

Digitisation Breakout Sessions

13:00

Delivering OpenShift-as-a-Service with OpenStack: Infrastructure as Code in Practise

Come and hear how Red Hat technologies including OpenStack, Ansible and OpenShift are used to deliver OpenShift-as-a-Service at leading Public Sector cloud provider, UKCloud. A tale of continuous delivery, infrastructure as code and devops.

13:45

Customer Presentation - 'Architecture – Business First'

Inmarsat is embarking on a transformational roadmap that is placing its customer at the heart of its Digital Agenda. This agenda is moving all operations into the cloud, architected to deliver agile and adaptable business capabilities founded upon well understood and communicated business process and process change. The talk is to show some of the principles behind this architecture and focuses on how business processes are used as a key input not just a deliverable.

14:30

Automation, Patching and Insights - why Hope is not a Strategy

Chris Milsted, Principal Solution Architect - Red Hat

Everything starts on day one with a fresh install, but we all know that systems do not run themselves. Historically the most common approach seems to be giving root access to certain teams to manually carry out actions, resulting in drift and a collection of "snowflakes" to run the business. Starting with a look at changes in thinking in how to operate systems, we will take a quick look at the SRE model. With some high level approaches defined then we can look at how tooling like Satellite, Ansible Tower and Red Hat Insights can assist in these new paradigms. We will also take a quick look at how things like containers could change approaches again and explore techniques such as re-paving.

Customer Presentation - Efficiency & Effectiveness through DevOps

The British Army’s Information Application Services branch had a requirement to provide an automation and orchestration capability which could bring modern DevOps and Continuous Integration methodologies into the Army Hosting Environment. Ansible Tower was implemented in late 2016, following a migration to a secured Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosting platform, to improve control, knowledge and delegation - the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the IT organisation was immediately improved. In this talk, you'll hear about their DevOps & Continuous Integration journey and how it has allowed their smartest people to work on more innovative projects.

Plus, you'll learn:

How they secured RHEL for use within the Army’s Private Cloud environments

Why Ansible was selected as their defecto DevOps automation platform

How Ansible Tower gave them the security they needed to manage sensitive data

What type of time-savings and cost-savings effects they have experienced

16:25

All ways on, mostly connected, always integrated, the API economy

Phil Prosser, Senior Solution Architect - Red Hat

Whether you plan to monetise your services via API's or mobile apps their is a constant - integration. Micro services, serverless architectures, are becoming the norm and with that compound services. The way you construct and run your business has become less about construction, more about orchestration. In this presentation we look at the underlying capabilities, scale and architectures of Integration, mobile, key service development, exposure and management through API's.

Lightning Breakout Sessions

13:00

RHEL in 2017; Because the OS Still Matters

Adrian Keward, Principal Solution Architect, Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2017; In this session you will be able to understand the deployment options and life cycle for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) covering all processor architectures and addons. The session will include the latest information on using SAP Solutions on RHEL and the Common Criteria certification for RHEL 7. As we move to the future of the most widely used commercial Linux Distribution, the session will also cover Modularity design initiative. TAGS ; RHEL (x86_64, ARM, POWER, SystemZ), Containers, Atomic, HA, EUS, SAP, CC/EAL

13:45

Process Automation - Enabling Digital Transformation

Waqaas Kausar, Senior Solution Architect - Red Hat

Organisations deliver value to their customers through their business processes. Automating, optimising and measuring these business processes are essential parts of a digital transformation strategy that can help you drive greater value to your customers. Join us in this session to understand the value of Red Hat’s Business Automation technology and how it can be integrated into your wider Digital Transformation efforts such as Mobile and API enablement.

14:30

Martin Etmajer, Technology Lead, Dynatrace

Until recently, applications ran on a handful of carefully curated technologies for years to come, deployments were static and teams siloed. In the microservices age, teams are cross-functional, pick the technologies they consider to work best for them, and are held accountable for what they produce. Application deployments are fine-grained, frequent, scalable and fully automated. What a shift and what a challenge for monitoring such environments!

In this session, we'll discuss key findings from monitoring large container application and microservice environments, why your monitoring solution should be a feature of your platform, and how to effectively perform root-cause analysis with a full-stack monitoring solution from Dynatrace, powered by artificial intelligence.

15:40

The Power of a Common Language. Red Hat Management with Ansible Inside

Digital Transformation drives application developers to create new applications quicker and deliver them faster. IT Operations need to provide scalable, on-demand, and consistent infrastructure platforms to support this. Management tooling which provides automation that's accessible to everyone is key. Learn how the common language of Ansible is transforming Red Hat Management solutions.

16:25

OpenShift... There's a pipeline for that

James Allen, Solution Architect - Red Hat

In the days of buzzwords bingo with topics such as Agile, DevOps and microservices it is becoming a must for many companies to adopt the buzz behind the words? This session will demonstrate how the openshift platform can be utilised to aid in the adoption of these topics as well as outlining many other non technical aspects that must be considered.

Specialist Breakout Sessions

13:00

Making Infrastructure Really Boring

Tony Scully, Senior Solution Architect - Red Hat

Enjoy that sinking feeling as all your infrastructure goes down during a 'simple' configuration change? Like to spend weekends sleeping under a desk doing a production upgrade? Love eating cold pizza in the war room? If you don't, come and hear how Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Software Defined Everything is helping customers move infrastructure from fear to boredom.

13:45

Partner Presentation: Agile Cloud Migration with Ansible

Luke Morton, Director, Made Tech

Cloud migration is a tale riddled with legacy applications and tricky problems. With an increasing pressure to move to the cloud, a lack of migration experience, and a suite of entangled applications, organisations are faced with a big challenge.
The answer from our experience isn't a large programme to migrate everything. To reduce risk and build confidence, smaller steps are key, and prioritisation of what to move first is vital for success.
We'll discuss our experiences and provide practical advice for migrating to the cloud with Ansible, the agile way. If you have legacy applications that need to be migrated to the cloud you'll want to hear what we have to say.

14:30

Empower your data with real time data architectures

Erica Langhi, Senior Solution Architect - Red Hat

Data is the new oil and in today's competitive business environment, fast access to accurate information is needed for a competitive edge. Like oil, learning to extract and use data can bring huge benefits.In this session you will learn how to use agile data integration technologies to optimise access to all data with less replication and cost, improving information agility to support your business decisions and using analytics to differentiate your business and transform it into a real-time enterprise.

15:40

JEE Application migration to EE7 and EAP

In 1999, a crack commando unit was assigned to build a business application they didn't want. These men promptly left the app in a maximum-security datacenter never to be touched again. Today, still needed by the business, the application barely survives with the modern architecture used in businesses and needs to be updated. If you have an application migration problem... if no one else can help... and if you can find them... maybe you can use... The Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit. Join us as we discuss the benefits of moving to JEE7, how Red Hat can help in that migration with the Migration Tools we have as well as the benefits of using JBoss EAP 7. If you need to migrate or update an application. This is the talk for you.

16:25

Digital Transformation? You might just need a Mobile App Platform

Jon Walton, Senior Solution Architect - Red Hat

Nearly every company we see has some kind of digital transformation programme that involves mobile. If you don't then you might be at a disadvantage. The development of mobile apps throws up some unique challenges, which can be solved by using the Red Hat Management Platform.

Event Sponsors

We have a number of sponsorship opportunities. For further details, please contact us.

PLATINUM SPONSOR

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions – underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network – Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com

Estafet is an expert integration consultancy, specialising in Red Hat and Java. We have a 70 strong team, located in the UK and in our nearshore facility in Bulgaria. Together the teams deliver agile integration projects from complex IOT solutions to moving legacy applications to the cloud.

In the UK we share Microsoft’s global vision to empower every person and organisation to achieve more; but we also pursue a wide range of initiatives with particular resonance and relevance to the UK. From working responsibly and sustainably to ensuring that the technology we create makes life better - not just for our customers, partners and employees, but for everyone.

SILVER SPONSORS

Dynatrace has redefined how you monitor today’s digital ecosystems. AI-powered, full stack and completely automated, it’s the only solution that provides answers, not just data, based on deep insight into every user, every transaction, across every application. The world’s leading brands, including, 72 of the Fortune 100, trust Dynatrace to optimize customer experiences, innovate faster and modernize IT operations with absolute confidence.

Made Tech's mission is to improve software delivery in every organisation. We believe we can help large organisations and governments by combining our software engineering capabilities with experience in adapting organisational processes to embrace new technology.

Wipro Limited is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. Recognized globally for a comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future.Wipro is the exclusive sponsor of the Red Hat Forum Demo Room.

BRONZE SPONSORS

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now commonly known as cloud computing. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world.

Organisations worldwide use Black Duck‘s industry-leading products to automate the process of securing and managing open source software, eliminating the pain related to security vulnerabilities, compliance and operational risk. Black Duck is headquartered in Burlington, MA, and has offices in San Jose, CA, London, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

CoScale offers a Red Hat certified solution for OpenShift monitoring. The CoScale platform continuously monitors all containers and microservices, and automatically detects changes and anomalies to help with proactive problem detection and resolution. For more information, visit www.coscale.com/openshift-monitoring.

What are your containers doing? Sysdig is the most powerful container-native monitoring and
troubleshooting solution. Built on ContainerVision™, Sysdig can see inside your containers
without intrusive instrumentation. We natively integrate with the entire container ecosystem,
giving you deep visibility into your applications and microservices. Free trial at www.sysdig.com

Tier 2 Consulting is a Red Hat Premier Middleware Solutions Partner for the UK&I. We work with high profile clients across automotive, financial, insurance, engineering and pharmaceuticals sectors. Our extensive knowledge of core Red Hat JBoss products and emerging technologies such as OpenShift makes us an ideal partner for clients embracing digital transformation challenges and agile DevOps methodologies.

UKCloud has helped revolutionise the way Government deploys and procures IT and delivers public services. As the power behind public sector technology we’ve won many awards including the coveted 2017 Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation, we’re joint winners of the OpenStack SuperUser Award and we’re Red Hat's first Premier CCSP in the UK.

Speakers

Michel Isnard
Vice President EMEA, Red Hat

Michel Isnard is responsible for leading the regional management team and managing the relationship with Red Hat customers and partners, as well as promoting Red Hat's innovative value-proposition to answer the challenge of Digital Transformation that all Enterprises are facing together with a focus on shifting enterprise computing from proprietary to open source technology solutions across the entire region.

Joe Fitzgerald
Vice President, Management Business Unit, Red Hat

Joe Fitzgerald is VP and GM of the Management Business Unit, responsible for management products and strategy at Red Hat. Joe has over 30 years of experience in engineering, operations, systems and cloud management. Prior to joining Red Hat he was CEO and co-founder of ManageIQ, CTO and Distinguished Technologist at HP, and CTO and co-founder of Novadigm. Joe has numerous patents across cloud and systems management in virtualization, security, compliance, configuration management, OS installation and software distribution.

I have a passion for technology and its application and have had the good fortune to work on a wide variety of pioneering engagements to deliver large and complex systems to clients in Financial Services, Utilities, Energy, Retail, Government and Telecommunications, I've gained experienced in a surprisingly wide range of technology architectures including infrastructure (from Mainframe to mobile), networks (X25 to webservices) and application software (both package and custom development). Perhaps not surprisingly, I also own a Raspberry Pi. In addition to client focused delivery, I am Accenture's Lead Technology Architect globally and also lead our Advance Technology & Architecture group across Europe and Latin America.

Dorian was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1997, and has served in a wide range of Army and Joint units, with operational experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland. Despite being a Royal Engineer he has spent all of his staff tours in the IS/IT domain, his initial Major assignment was in the BATCIS team delivering Bowman (Land tactical CIS) and applications for it; subsequently postings include G6 Projects within Army HQ delivering applications and a hosting environment and in Joint Force Command as a Joint User for Networks for C4ISR devising policy for the use of Defence IS. Currently, serving as Head of Operations for Information Application Services, (IAS - The Army Software House), he is the single “ring able” necks for live services across 3 security domains and 200 services. He has also been given the honour of delivering Agile and DevOps within IAS across people, process and technology.

Aidan Beeson
Linux Technical Architect - British Army

Aidan has been working with UNIX and Linux systems in the defence sector since graduating from Exeter University in 1999. He is a proponent of DevOps methodologies and techniques for building platforms and has extensive experience of creating automated, minimal user interaction, installations of complex, highly available, infrastructure software. He has also configured Linux Operating Systems for use within secure hosting environments and their integration with SIEM, security scanning and system monitoring capabilities. Aidan is currently the Linux Technical Architect within the Information Application Services (IAS) branch of the British Army Headquarters, helping them transform into an Agile and DevOps focused organisation using the latest Linux technologies.

Daniel Thornhill
Vice President of Product Management - Deutsche Bank

With more than 18 years experience in leading edge technology companies, Daniel Thornhill is currently Vice President of Product Management for the PaaS Technology product portfolio at Deutsche Bank. In this role he is responsible for delivery and management of the products, and is a key contributor to the evolution of the product strategy. Prior to joining Deutsche Bank, Daniel held a number of senior positions at ValidSoft, a leading edge cyber security company.

Paul McDonald
Community Manager for PaaS Programmes - Deutsche Bank

Paul McDonald currently looks after Community Management for PaaS Programmes in Deautsche Bank. His background traverse a multitude of industries and roles, with a predominant concentration around customers and market making activities.